Installation and Configuration

First thing on the list to installing the mother-board inside our test rig, will be to install the Karajan 8.1 Audio Riser card. We told you the spec's a couple pages ago, so now its time for installation. This audio card utilizes a plastic support bracket to secure the riser card to the mother-board, let's take a look.

Here we can see the two attachment holes that will secure the bracket and riser card into place. The Karajan 8.1 riser card is simply plugged into the mother-board with the aid of a support bracket that firmly secures the riser card to the mother-board.

The riser card is then connected to the 14-pin female socket and the riser card bracket, which snaps into the two holes shown above. This is an isolated audio card that gives superior audio quality by isolating the analog and digital signals from other components of the mother-board, giving better sound quality and less noise interference found in other designs.

Done deal, the Karajan 8.1 channel audio riser card is now installed, the default jumpers should be left in the default configuration for best results. Also you can see the CDR-ROM audio header, which will allow you to connect your CD-ROM or DVD device to play audio from your compact disc or DVD media. Now that the Karajan card is snapped firmly into place and we are now ready to install this specimen into our test rig.

Thanks to our participating sponsors and manufacturers we can install this motherboard combined with some very cool and exciting hardware including ram sponsored by Mushkin, the thermoelectric waterchiller thanks to Gabe over at Swiftech. All stuffed into a Thermaltake Armor series case, lets take a look at this configuration...

Installing the DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR is easy and simple. Just like any other ATX installation, we proceeded to stuff our sponsored hardware in our Thermaltake Armor series case. Starting with the motherboard I installed the Athlon 64 3500+ CPU and covered it with a Swiftech ThermoElectric Cooled CPU cooler and stuff a set of Mushkin HP3200 redline series ram.

Next we acquired a Thermaltake 480 watt Total Watts Viewer, which is a powerful and stable power supply unit featuring real time viewing of power load via front bay device control panel. Using the stock fan that shipped with Thermaltake Armor case I covered the 120mm fan with a mirror finish 120mm skull fan grill courtesy of Crazy PC.

After installing the two power supply units (Thermaltake 480watt TWV, Meanwell 320 dedicated) we are using for this build, I went ahead and installed the water cooling tube circuits followed by the hard drive and graphics cards. Once we wired it up for power, I charged the cooling system with the liquid coolant and primed the water pump and powered up the system for a pressure test. After 24 hours of leak free operations, I energized the rest of the system and booted this puppy up.

Presto - the system booted and now I will put the case on and sit back and check out the DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR BIOS and familiarize with the functionality of the BIOS. For starters I am setting system defaults and then loading up the OS and we can burn this rig in for several hours using Super Pi in a Windows environment. The OS is loaded and Super PI is running. Now I will sit back and let this thing crunch some numbers while I take a break and grab some lunch.

The DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR is sweet looking with the UV reactive connectors, slots and ports. Thanks to Malsert Chapman at Ultra Products, they sent us their dual 12" UV cold cathode tube kit to make this rig glow and as you can see the rig is lit up and looks pretty damn good.

Here we can see the graphics cards in SLI mode with the rig fully operational and ready for some stress testing. Temperatures we got with the Swiftech TEC cooler puts the core temperatures at -2.0° ~ -3.0°C in a windows environment - idle state and under full 100% load we sampled temperatures at 17.0° ~ 18.0°C. So we can say the TEC cooler by Swiftech is stomping all over the heat miser. I think its time to load up the drivers and then some game titles along with our benchmark applications and go take a look at some technical aspects of this combination of hardware we are using.